1. Your first audience isn’t your customers
Most businesses start by thinking about their customer audience. But your first – and most important – audience is internal. They’re the ones who carry the message, interpret it in their work, and deliver it to the world every day. If they don’t “get” the brand, no amount of marketing spend can paper over that gap.
This isn’t a fluffy point about culture or morale – it’s the foundation for coherence, consistency and credibility.
Brand understanding isn’t an outcome of communication – it’s the precondition for it.
2. The difference between being told and understanding
Many organisations “launch” their brand internally with the best of intentions – a set of slides, a campaign, maybe even a town hall. But what most people get is information, not understanding. They’ve been told what the brand is, but not how to use it.
True internal alignment is about brand fluency – the ability to apply the brand naturally in decision-making, conversations, and everyday choices.
Fluency is when your people can make brand-led decisions without having to check the rulebook.
3. The messy truth inside organisations
Of course, this is easier said than done. Inside most organisations, people are time-pressured, juggling priorities, firefighting issues. They’re not resisting the brand – they’re just overwhelmed.
The brand’s meaning and language need to be instantly usable. If it takes too long to explain, it won’t survive the day-to-day realities of work.
It’s not that people don’t care about the brand. It’s that the brand has to make it easy for them to care.
4. Why clarity is the real power move
This is where so many brands trip up. They overcomplicate, overword, and overthink.
But the easier a brand is to understand, the easier it is to believe in – and that’s when it starts to live in the organisation. Making a brand simple and easy to grasp isn’t dumbing it down – it’s making it workable.
And that’s the only kind of brand that actually travels.
Clarity isn’t a creative compromise. It’s what gives creativity room to work.
5. When it works, culture changes itself
When brand understanding really takes hold, something remarkable happens: people stop having to remember the brand, and start living it. They make decisions, write emails, design presentations, and talk to customers in ways that instinctively align. No brand police. No reminders. No checklists. Just a shared way of thinking that spreads naturally.
That’s when the magic happens – when brand understanding becomes culture, and culture carries the brand forward without effort.
At Good, we’ve seen this happen first-hand. The strongest brands aren’t the ones customers recognise – they’re the ones employees believe in, use, and pass on effortlessly.